[Very Possibly Solved] Why the Macbook Pro 2016 is slower than 2015?

[TrueBlou]

It is exciting. I hope everything works out well for you!

This is stupid but...I really missed that "new apple smell", this time around. You know, that classic, scotch tape like smell. Made the unboxing experience less than anticipated. A very industrial, stale, scent as I unpackaged everything. LOL

There's no new Apple smell? That's poop, rather weirdly I always enjoyed that as part of the unboxing process

Well as planned I've taken the plunge today. MacBook Pro 15" upgraded to a 2.9 i7, 1TB SSD and 460 Graphics. That along with a selection of cables, adapters and AppleCare came to a not insubstantial (I think) amount of just under £3,800 (or about $4,700 for our American cousins.)

Very excited though, can't wait for it to arrive. Sadly that's an estimated 2 weeks, but we'll see. Been a while since I've spent that much on a nice new Mac, hope it's worth it. Hell even my new 55" 4K OLED and PS4 Pro to go with it, cost less than that

Edit;
Incidentally for people complaining about the price, I priced the exact same setup on Apple.com and converting it to £'s and adding the U.K. tax, it worked out exactly the same price.

Even using the same setup and adding on the tax rate for Texas (because am a country boy at heart, I was once told I'd make a good cowboy, by a Texan when I was in the states for work, but that's neither here nor there ) and converting that price to pounds without adding on U.K. Tax worked out only a couple hundred pounds different.

So as if we didn't know already, the price isn't entirely Apple's fault (well, yes they did pump the base price up a bit) but that aside the pish poor value of the pound and as usual the high cost of tax here in the U.K. Is to blame.

 

[sakabaro]

There's no new Apple smell? That's poop, rather weirdly I always enjoyed that as part of the unboxing process

Well as planned I've taken the plunge today. MacBook Pro 15" upgraded to a 2.9 i7, 1TB SSD and 460 Graphics. That along with a selection of cables and adapters and AppleCare came to a not insubstantial (I think) amount of just under £3,800 (or about $4,700 for our American cousins.)

Very excited though, can't wait for it to arrive. Sadly that's an estimated 2 weeks, but we'll see. Been a while since I've spent that much on a nice new Mac, hope it's worth it. Hell even my new 55" 4K OLED and PS4 Pro to go with it, cost less than that

Bought the exact same one!

 

[TrueBlou]

Bought the exact same one!

Ah, clearly a person of very good judgment and taste then

Did you get yours yet? How you finding the performance, I'll mostly be using Xcode/Photoshop/Illustrator/Autodesk Fusion 360/FCPX and so on (with some SimCity thrown in for when I'm pretending to be working )

 

[Arpit jain]

Also integrated GPU which is responsible for 90% of daily task is much slower in 2016 model vs 2015 model

2016 - HD 530 (much slower)
2015 - iris pro 5200 (also having 128MB L4 cache or eDRAM)

Answer:
The memory and cpu on the new Macbook Pro is holding the machine back. Apple wanted to preserve battery life so they made some compromises at the expense of performance.

1- Memory is slower.
2- CPU has a lower max clock speed.
3- Skylake runs faster on DDR4 not DDR3.

**important point**
Yes they are different chipsets and there are many variables which is why this is just a starting point and possibly solved not actually solved. Over to you world!

Why?
Apple wanted to keep the battery life to 10hours as we have come to expect. Skylake doesn't have support for low powered DDR4 so they had to go with low powered DDR3. However Skylake also doesn't officially support 2133Mhz DDR3 so they had to lower the timings and do what they could to get the higher frequency running and keep the power usage meeting requirements they set. This is why you also can't get 32GB of ram, it will use double the power.

Proof: 1. Memory is slower
The memory on the 2016 model is CL16, the memory on the 2015 is CL11.

In time this means:
2015 DDR3 1600Mhz CL11 latency: 13.75 nanoseconds
2016 DDR3 2133Mhz CL16 latency: 15 nanoseconds
Source: DDR3 RAM ineffectiveness sheet.
(lower is better.)

Latency timing screenshots in CPU-z:

2016
(Source Macrumors member deadworlds Thank you!!)

2015
(Notebookcheck.info Not the most credible source so if someone can do another test that would be great)

Memory Performance:
2015 memory latency Geekbench 4: 12.5 Moperations/sec
2016 memory latency Geekbench 4: 7.64 Moperations/sec

2015 memory bandwidth Geekbench 4: 25.1 GB/sec
2016 memory bandwidth Geekbench 4: 24.9 GB/sec

2015 memory copy Geekbench 4: 14.4 GB/sec
2016 memory copy Geekbench 4: 13.8 GB/sec

Remember this is DDR3 1600Mhz vs 2133Mhz so the numbers shouldn't be this tight.

2015 source: https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/942360
2016 source: https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/1047696

Proof: 2- CPU has a lower max clock speed
2016 max speed: 3.8Ghz
2015 max speed: 4Ghz
Source: http://ark.intel.com/compare/88972,83503

*Note* I am not saying that the 2015 CPU is a faster CPU. I am saying that in combination with the ram compromises it makes the 2016 i7 perform slower.*

Proof: 3- Skylake runs faster on DDR4 not DDR3.

Source: http://www.corsair.com/en/blog/2015/november/ddr3-vs-ddr4


Suggestion to Apple:
Give your customers the option to choose. Bring out a fix.
When plugged in, we are happy for lower timing if we get faster speeds.
If you want 32GB you will have lower battery performance.

Thoughts moving forward:
Apple is going to release a new Macbook Pro in 2017 on a new Intel chipset which will support LPDDR4. This will be the must faster Macbook and what we have come to expect.

*****Requests to the community*****:
Someone who has a completely upgraded 2015 Macbook Pro 15" Retina, can you please do a CPU-z and get us the memory details?

Also if we can do some memory/cpu benchmarks. Open to suggestion as to what would confirm the above theory.

Special thanks:
Thank you to members of the forum, specifically deadworlds for doing the test to get us the data, without him we wouldn't have been able to confirm anything. And Peter the CTO of ServersAustralia for helping me ask the right questions and identifying where the issues were as it didn't make sense why it was slower.

Answer:
The memory and cpu on the new Macbook Pro is holding the machine back. Apple wanted to preserve battery life so they made some compromises at the expense of performance.

1- Memory is slower.
2- CPU has a lower max clock speed.
3- Skylake runs faster on DDR4 not DDR3.

**important point**
Yes they are different chipsets and there are many variables which is why this is just a starting point and possibly solved not actually solved. Over to you world!

Why?
Apple wanted to keep the battery life to 10hours as we have come to expect. Skylake doesn't have support for low powered DDR4 so they had to go with low powered DDR3. However Skylake also doesn't officially support 2133Mhz DDR3 so they had to lower the timings and do what they could to get the higher frequency running and keep the power usage meeting requirements they set. This is why you also can't get 32GB of ram, it will use double the power.

Proof: 1. Memory is slower
The memory on the 2016 model is CL16, the memory on the 2015 is CL11.

In time this means:
2015 DDR3 1600Mhz CL11 latency: 13.75 nanoseconds
2016 DDR3 2133Mhz CL16 latency: 15 nanoseconds
Source: DDR3 RAM ineffectiveness sheet.
(lower is better.)

Latency timing screenshots in CPU-z:

2016
(Source Macrumors member deadworlds Thank you!!)

2015
(Notebookcheck.info Not the most credible source so if someone can do another test that would be great)

Memory Performance:
2015 memory latency Geekbench 4: 12.5 Moperations/sec
2016 memory latency Geekbench 4: 7.64 Moperations/sec

2015 memory bandwidth Geekbench 4: 25.1 GB/sec
2016 memory bandwidth Geekbench 4: 24.9 GB/sec

2015 memory copy Geekbench 4: 14.4 GB/sec
2016 memory copy Geekbench 4: 13.8 GB/sec

Remember this is DDR3 1600Mhz vs 2133Mhz so the numbers shouldn't be this tight.

2015 source: https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/942360
2016 source: https://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/1047696

Proof: 2- CPU has a lower max clock speed
2016 max speed: 3.8Ghz
2015 max speed: 4Ghz
Source: http://ark.intel.com/compare/88972,83503

*Note* I am not saying that the 2015 CPU is a faster CPU. I am saying that in combination with the ram compromises it makes the 2016 i7 perform slower.*

Proof: 3- Skylake runs faster on DDR4 not DDR3.

Source: http://www.corsair.com/en/blog/2015/november/ddr3-vs-ddr4


Suggestion to Apple:
Give your customers the option to choose. Bring out a fix.
When plugged in, we are happy for lower timing if we get faster speeds.
If you want 32GB you will have lower battery performance.

Thoughts moving forward:
Apple is going to release a new Macbook Pro in 2017 on a new Intel chipset which will support LPDDR4. This will be the must faster Macbook and what we have come to expect.

*****Requests to the community*****:
Someone who has a completely upgraded 2015 Macbook Pro 15" Retina, can you please do a CPU-z and get us the memory details?

Also if we can do some memory/cpu benchmarks. Open to suggestion as to what would confirm the above theory.

Special thanks:
Thank you to members of the forum, specifically deadworlds for doing the test to get us the data, without him we wouldn't have been able to confirm anything. And Peter the CTO of ServersAustralia for helping me ask the right questions and identifying where the issues were as it didn't make sense why it was slower.